Free Will #11 – Hints about random numbers

          This entry is just to provide some hints to the number series I presented in entry #10 on Free Will <*here*>.

          If you don’t want to see any hints, then don’t scroll down. 

Previously I presented this:

BOX A

1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1
0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	1	1	0	1	0
1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1
0	0	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0
1	0	1	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	1	0	0	1
1	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	1
0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	0	1	0	0
1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	1

1’s = 77/149 (51.7%)

BOX B

1	0	1	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	1	0	1
0	0	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	0	1	1	1	0	1
1	0	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0
0	0	1	1	0	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	1	0	0	1	1	0	1
0	0	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	1	0	1	1	1	1	0	0	1	1
1	0	1	0	1	1	1	0	0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	1
0	0	1	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	0	0	1	0	0	0	1	1
0	1	0	1	1	0	1	0	0

1’s = 74/149 (49.7%)

          I said I’d be interested if anyone can figure out which of the two series is the “encoded” one; and if so, how you figured it out.  Of course, it would be really impressive if someone could figure out the encoded message, but I think they would need a longer series to figure that out, even if I told you which one had the message. 

First Hint

The message is encoded as individual alphabetical letters.

Each letter is five bits.

Scroll down for more hints…

Second Hint

There is a four bit flag to indicate whether the subsequent data is useful or gibberish.

Third Hint

So, to be clear, the bits are arranged in groups of nine, where the first four bits combine to produce a flag and the last five bits are the data.  If the flag is up, then the next five bits are valid data indicating the next letter in the sentence.  If the flag is down, the next five bits can be ignored and you move to the next flag.

Fourth Hint

The “real data” flag is “0101”.

Fifth Hint

Letter coding is as follows:

Sixth Hint

OK.  The message says “I am alive” and it is in Box A.

Note that with this method, you would have to know that you have the start of the message because everything is counted from that first bit.  So, I also imagined that there would be two “start/stop” five bit “letters”:  “10000” and “01111” that, when they appear, indicate that the subsequent four bits form one of the flags.  Thus, if you broke in the middle of intercepting this series, you could still figure out the starting point for the message by identifying a start and stop bit.

Hope that makes sense.

I think a computer could figure this out because of the likely high rate of the “0101” flag series at multiples of nine.  But, because of the flag, you can always add as much gibberish as you want, so I imagined that you could just add all of the four bit “non-flags” to match the frequency of the real flags.  That would mean that there would be 15 gibberish fields (9 bits) for every one real field. 

This series requires a “mind” to make it appear truly random.  By that I mean that you really have to keep track of a lot of things for the series to work.  For example, you can’t just generate random series of 9 bits for the gibberish because a random series will sometimes start with the “0101” series of bits, which you have reserved as a flag.  Also, depending on the letters in the sentence, if you want to maintain the overall random nature of the whole set, you have to select gibberish series that counteract whatever trends their might be in the data series.  For example, if you have a sentence with a lot of “X”s in it, which is encoded as “00001”, then your whole set will tend to be highly skewed to “0” bits unless your gibberish tends to have more “1” bits in it.  Obviously in any random series it doesn’t have to work out to exactly 50:50, but you have to keep running count of the characteristics of the series and add gibberish that tends to move those characteristics back to the characteristics of the totally random series.  This could be done by a computer program that tracks the characteristics of the series so far and then adjusts the random selection of bits by weighting the selection towards the desired characteristics.  Ultimately, you’d need to track not just the total ratio of “0” and “1”s, but also the rate of bit pairs, triplets, quadruplets, etc.  This concept is very inefficient in terms of the data delivered compared to the total bits delivered, but I’m not sure that efficiency is required for my original proposition.  The point is you could encode information in what otherwise seems to be random bits.  If there really is a fundamental quantum randomness to everything, how could it be proven that there is not information encoded in that randomness?

My original point was to address the question of whether free will could act, yet not violate basic physical laws like conservation of energy.  I guess others have postulated that free will just re-distributes energy without creating or destroying any, and essentially that is what I am proposing here.  The energy is redistributed so that it encodes real information.

In my example, free will would be very inefficient because it would spend most of “it’s” time re-distributing energy just to create gibberish that would be ignored.  But this is not a problem in my concept of free will.  I don’t believe free will is involved in most “decisions” that we make.  I think most of the time we live our lives in some kind of autopilot and we really don’t often “break out” of the cause and effect cycle.  I think that, to a large extend, our biological brain is a deterministic system with a bit of randomness thrown in.  On rare occasions our free will breaks through and actually influences a decision.  In fact, this might only happen a few times a day…or maybe it is even much rarer than that…maybe our free will only really steps in a few times in our life.  If we look back on our life, there are decision-points that really shape who we are, and in between there is a lot of just “living life” in which we are just responding to what is in front of us.

An interesting outcome of my suggested method of free will action is that whenever you do intervene with free will (i.e. when you do enter the “up” flag and then real data) there is a the need to “balance it out” with gibberish.  I think this matches the human experience pretty well.  When I do something really good for someone that is “out of my comfort zone”, I feel this sense that “ok – now I can go back to being my average self”.  And if I do something like three good deeds in a row, there is this sense that “ok – now I’m allowed to do something that is not so great.”  But maybe that’s going too far with my extrapolation here.  I have a feeling that I will have to revisit this thought many times and tighten it up ... or maybe abandon it entirely.